Tips and Tricks to Tackle Difficult People at Work

Numerous managers and supervisors are always promoted to management positions that are based on their hard skills. Still, a few of them have had adequate training in the typical area of managing people, especially managing difficult people. In the task of conducting seminars on managing people, there is one challenge, which is often heard among managers and supervisors that face nowadays challenges is how to manage a difficult employee. You simply can’t control them, but you can easily control their environment in the hopes of coaching that particular employee for better performance.

It’s all about documentation. And as far as the courts are concerned, in case it isn’t written down that means it did not even happen. Even if you have a prospective employee that signed a form saying they know they could be terminated at any time, without any premeditated cause, and without and prior warning or reason. So, you would never want to terminate without accurate and proper documentation. Terminating an employee without any cause, reason, or some prior warning, could make it easier for that particular difficult person to win a wrongful termination lawsuit. You can learn from employee management training.

The art of document training and coaching too is very significant. Any type of training that you intend to provide to your difficult employee is always considered coaching. In managing difficult people, a number of managers have a tendency of assuming the documentation is done in order to build a case for termination. But it is not! It’s in reality to show everything else you did to try and salvage the very difficult employee. This also includes any and all kinds of training. Whether you have trained the employee, or someone else had trained them, or you even sent them to a seminar that was conducted to be coached for a better performance. Employee management conferences too come in handy from time to time.Avoid the word “attitude.” In managing difficult people, why would you want to avoid saying something like, “Pat, I don’t like your attitude?” Because it’s too subjective. It’s not specific enough.

You need to focus instead of stressing on specific behaviours or the quality of a person’s work. For instance, what you should have done if every time try you delegate a special project to the difficult person, they have a habit of folding their arms, exhaling loudly, rolling their eyes, and have a tendency of sarcastically mutter under their breath, “Okay, whatever?!”